Various forms of grasses including chaffy seed grasses are becoming popular for grazing and large scale seeding operations for grasses which include chaffy grass seed are relatively expensive due to the extensive seed processing operations which must be performed in order to produce a seed product which is clean, substantially pure and includes minimum seed damage.
Present steps to process chaffy seed grasses include the use of a hammer mill to separate the seed from the grass stem and subsequent seed cleaning treatment to debeard and deglume the seed. However, hammer mills cause high percentage of seed damage and present apparatuses utilized to debeard and deglume seed are only minimumly effective and tend to cause greater damage to the seed.
Accordingly, a need exists for apparatus by which seed may be more efficiently removed from grass stems and debearded and deglumed. The present invention is concerned primarily with more efficient removing of the seed from the grass stems with minimum damage to the seed.
Examples of previously known devices including some of the general structural and operational features of the instant invention are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 640,793, 2,011,365, 2,416,008, 3,087,618, 3,347,373, 3,837,490, 4,030,606 and 4,340,469.